These past few weeks I've been working to cultivate and grow our network of data partners. It's an ongoing process, as I've written about before, to establish the relationships that will eventually yield the insights about consumer behavior that we and our clients find valuable.

It's also incredibly exciting, to learn about the unique personalities of different wine platforms and what they can each contribute to the wine consumer puzzle that we're piecing together.

This week I'd like to share with you two things that have particularly piqued my interest during the course of these most recent conversations. They come from two different platforms, one that's fairly new and one that's well-established.

For as much as I’m a personal fan of small-production wines, and the small importers and distributors who bring them to market, there’s also no denying the sway and influence of major distributors. It’s a significant advantage of the Beverage Media Group to have 20+ years worth of trade data for the country’s biggest players, particularly in major price-posting markets of the Northeastern U.S., including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Looking for localized buying trends in the eCommerce market? BevMedia’s data has the reach and the history that speaks to them.

Besides their focus on providing deep sensory data and analytics, what piques my interest about Quini Wine Intelligence is the visibility it provides retailers into the taste profiles of their customers. (See image above.) The tasting application records between 50 and 60 data points about any given wine, which is feedback that the retailer can see in real time. Which means that the retailer can pull up the customer’s profile while they’re standing in the store, for example, or when the retailer is putting together their next wine club shipment or promotion that steers the customer toward a flavor profile that they already favor.

What's cool is to see the puzzle pieces clicking into place. What's especially cool is to see the picture of today's wine consumer become more clear with each additional piece of the puzzle.

The information is already there. It's a question of assembling it -- the right pieces, in the right configuration -- in order to best address your business' needs.